PETER HITCHENS: So how long will it be before we invite the IS jihadis to a white-tie dinner?

Patrick Magee (pictured in Belfast last year) is free and apparently living a happy and contented life while his victims lie in their graves

While we rage and fret about the terrorist outrages of today, how quickly we forget the horrors of the recent past.

I can’t see why. The grief, loss and pain don’t diminish as the years go by. For those who survive, they deepen.

And I admire Lord Tebbit for his unfashionable refusal to forgive the IRA murderers who tried to kill him and his wife, and who did them terrible harm (as well as slaying or maiming several others) in Brighton 30 years ago.

One of the grisly monsters responsible for this, Patrick Magee, now walks about in freedom, thanks to our surrender to the IRA, a national shame we bury in denial and pretend never happened, sometimes even kidding ourselves that we were the winners.

Well, if we won, how is it that Magee is free and apparently living a happy and contented life, while his victims lie in their graves or suffer daily pain and disability?

He was supposed to serve a minimum of 35 years and actually served 14. He still, disgustingly, claims that he had ‘no choice’ but to use the weapon of murder.

He has had the nerve to try to get his victims to ‘understand a bit better what motivated me’.

Some of those victims have, in my view quite mistakenly, forgiven him. Lord Tebbit says with simple dignity: ‘I am often asked if I can find it in my heart to forgive the creature, Patrick Magee, who planted the bomb. 'That is not possible, for Magee has never repented.’

Quite. I do not think the Christian religion instructs us to forgive the unrepentant. Nobody in any age but this could possibly imagine that we are supposed to forgive those who don’t seek our forgiveness.

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Forgiveness without repentance is like a door without a doorway, or a key without a lock. The one implies and demands the other.

This is something that also needs to be understood by the Blairite bag-carrier Jonathan Powell, who took an active part in the surrender talks with the IRA, and who has just written a book saying we will always have to talk to terrorists in the end.

Actually, this isn’t true. We always have done so, but that is not because we had no choice. We did it because we are weak and have lost our will to survive as a civilisation and a culture. If they knew we would never talk, and that we would crush them utterly, we would have many fewer of them.

As it is, terrorists decide the destiny of much of the world. The more militantly our leaders condemn them now, the more you can be sure that they will be inviting them to a white-tie dinner at Windsor in a year or two.

Mrs Clooney is right: we have to lose our Marbles

I back Amal Clooney in her battle to get the Elgin Marbles sent back to their home in Athens.

We rescued them from the Ottomans. We’ve guarded them well. But now their home is safe again, and we have had them for long enough.

They are one of the glories of human civilisation, and that is exactly why it would be right and generous for us to let them go back to the place they were made in and for.

Amal Clooney has been in Athens aiding the Greek government with its bid to secure the return of the Elgin Marbles

It is the civilised thing to do, without bargains or conditions.

I never really understood this until, in an American museum, I saw a sculpture that had once stood in Lincoln Cathedral.

I was enraged. Why was it not still there, where it belonged? But it was nothing like as important as the Marbles.

There can be no rule or precedent about this. There is only one Parthenon and only one Acropolis. That is why an act of selfless generosity is the best way of ending the quarrel.

Dave can’t stop deceiving – even after he’s caught

David Cameron must have known perfectly well that he had no power to fulfil his pledge to limit immigration as long as Britain stayed in the EU

How funny the ‘Conservative’ Party has become.

Not only are its would-be candidates for the Rochester by-election sternly asked in public if they, too, plan to defect.

One end of it doesn't know what the other end is doing. Last week the Mayor of London, Al (‘Boris’) Johnson, said the 2010 Tory promise to limit immigration was a ‘big deception’. This is quite true.

David Cameron must have known perfectly well that he had no power to fulfil this pledge as long as Britain stayed in the EU.

After this Ratner moment, in which a very senior party member openly admitted his party had lied to win votes, you might expect a pause before they did it again. But no, Mr Cameron started raging about an ‘emergency brake’ on immigration.

No details were given, because there weren’t any. Again, no such brake can be applied without leaving the EU. So Mr Cameron contrived to sound as if he was on the verge of favouring a British exit, when in real life he’s almost as Europhile as Jean-Claude Juncker.

Is it just me, or are people at last beginning to see through this amazingly transparent man, who resorts instinctively to dishonesty, as a weed in a dingy backyard climbs towards the light?

Let us hope that his attempt to drown the truth in money, in the Rochester by-election, fails.

Voters might ask themselves why the oligarchs and sharks who wrote cheques to the Tories at their semi-secret ‘Black and White Ball’ should be so keen to see Ukip beaten.

I don't think the Labour Party actually wants to win next May’s General Election. Given that government is far more enjoyable and better rewarded than opposition, why is this?

Some of Labour’s Blairites do actually prefer David Cameron to Ed Miliband. Mr Cameron boasts of being the ‘Heir to Blair’ and follows Blairite policies at home and abroad.

And the supposedly ineffectual Ed Miliband had the nerve to beat his Blairite brother in a fair fight, for which he will never be forgiven.

The supposedly ineffectual Ed Miliband had the nerve to beat his Blairite brother in a fair fight for which he will never be forgiven

But I think it’s even deeper than that. Labour’s leadership can see there’s a huge economic crisis coming soon, and don’t want to be in office when it happens.

If they exert themselves, the polls show they could get a narrow majority.

If they don’t exert themselves, the Tories can’t get a majority (this is an arithmetical impossibility) but they might just be the largest party. They’ll have little or no power, but they will take the blame for the coming crash.

It explains a lot, if I’m right.

At this time of year, how I long for the clocks to return to proper Greenwich time.

The mornings are ridiculously dark. So-called ‘daylight saving time’ (which does nothing of the kind) must have been devised by people who get up late, to torment those of us who get up early.